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This is my letter to the World






(1863)

This is one of the best known and most anthologized of Dickinson’s poems. In their 1890 first edition of Dickinson’s poems, Higginson and Todd even went so far as to title this poem “Prelude” and place it at the beginning of the volume so that it performed as an epigraph, setting the tone for the writing to follow. Their reasons for doing this are related to the way the poem can be read as expressing sentiments readers would have automatically associated with 19th-century womanhood. To be precise, Higginson and Todd were concerned that readers would not immediately accept the unconventional nature of many Dickinson poems; they wanted to introduce her writing in a manner that would win greater reader confidence. This poem accomplished that end by presenting a speaker who states immediately that “the World... never wrote to Me”, thereby proclaiming her conformity to the 19th-century cultural expectation that women inhabit the private sphere of the home and do not aspire to public lives. When the speaker goes on to explain that her “letter to the World” is important because it conveys “The simple News that Nature told”, she further defines herself as a passive transmitter of nature’s wisdom and not herself the source of original knowledge. This assertion of passivity reinforces the speaker’s reluctance to address the larger world; she merely transmits the authority that remains nature’s. The speaker’s statement that nature’s message “is committed / To Hands I cannot see” appropriately indicates that she has no sense of who might constitute her audience, as she is incapable of comprehending the way poetry reaches a public reading audience. Her final request that readers “Judge tenderly – of Me” provides a fitting conclusion by acknowledging her own sense that what she is doing is suspect. The collective impact of the poem is that it presents readers with a highly reticent female speaker who dares to address the public only because doing so is her way of serving nature.

Contemporary readers arrive at much different, often contradictory readings of the poem. Instead of interpreting the opening lines as the expression of a shy woman who sought no contact with the larger world, they often see the speaker as firing off an angry “letter to the World” that expresses her outrage at not having ever been written to by that world. This position is supported by the absence of terminal punctuation at the end of the first stanza, which enables a reading of lines 3 through 6 that dissociates the speaker from nature. According to this reading, “The simple News that Nature told” never reached the speaker but instead registered only with “Hands I cannot see”, which is to say, with people the speaker does not know. The speaker’s concluding request “Sweet – countrymen – / Judge tenderly – of Me” is viewed as highly ironic, even sarcastic. Interpreting the speaker in this way—as angry and defiant—leads to the conclusion that the poem condemns the social system that confined women within the narrow sphere of the home. The central role of nature in the poem serves to drive home the point that women whose lives are so narrowly restricted have no connection with nature and therefore are condemned to lead unnatural lives. This reading of the poem presents a speaker very nearly the opposite of the one Higginson and Todd may have intended Dickinson’s first readers to encounter. One of the joys of reading Dickinson’s poems is that they so frequently support disparate interpretations.

 






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